There are many apps, tools, extensions & services that work very well with Starling. Some of the following vendors are affiliated with us: they support Starling if you purchase their software or service via the links on this page. So if you're picking one of those, you're helping the Starling project at the same time!

What every Starling developer needs

Must-Haves

This book provides you with a one-stop-shop that contains every bit of information a Starling developer needs. Whether you are a raw recruit or you have been around since the very first beta — the Starling Handbook has you covered! The author: Daniel Sperl, the creator of Starling.

Flox is the no-fuzz game backend brought to you from the same team that created Starling! Forget about setting up servers, managing databases and writing code in two different places. It comes with an ActionScript SDK and was built ground-up with Starling in mind.

Starling can be used for more than games. Together with Feathers, Starling becomes a full-fledged solution for business applications! It provides light-weight, skinnable and extensible user interface components that will provide your users with a smooth and responsive experience. Perfect for game menus, too!

Finally, a visual, WYSIWYG way to create your in-game user interfaces! Starling Builder was built especially for (and with!) Starling and Feathers; it allows simple export of layouts, to be instantianted as standard display objects right in Starling. Free & Open Source!

The Citrus Engine is a professional-grade, scalable ActionScript 3 game engine built for industry-quality games using modern programming practices. It offers a nice way to separate logic/physics from art including rendering choice, physics engine and many other options.

Author stunning animations and display them in Starling

Flash Animation

With the GAF Converter you can create complex animations in Flash Pro and convert them into an open format ready for immediate use with Starling. Sign up with this link to get 500 conversions for free!

The DragonBones plugin adds skeletal animation capabilities directly to Flash Pro, through a design panel that allows you to set up your characters with maximum flexibility. Those animations can then be played back in Starling extremely easily.

Spine is an animation tool that focuses specifically on 2D animation for games. It aims to have an efficient, streamlined workflow, both for creating animations and for making use of those animations in games. The Starling runtime for Spine allows you to play back those animations with great performance.

Flump converts Flash keyframe animations into texture atlases and XML or JSON that can be easily integrated into any scene graph-based 2D game engine. Starling and Sparrow are supported out of the box!

Create sprite sheets and bitmap fonts for maximum performance

Texture & Font Generation

With TexturePacker, making spritesheets is easy and fast. TexturePacker supports many input data formats and exports to a lot of gaming frameworks. It has both GUI and commandline interface and lots of features to help you optimize your sprites to reduce memory usage and improve performance.

ShoeBox is a free Adobe Air based app for Windows and OS X with game and ui related tools. Shoebox is extremely versatile: use it to create or extract texture atlases or for creating bitmap fonts. Each tool uses a drag & drop- or clipbord interaction for a quick workflow.

Add polishment to your game with dynamic special effects

Special effects

Add dynamic lighting effects to your 2D games! Sprite Illuminator allows you to easily create and edit normal maps with powerful tools; Starling can use this information to illuminate your objects in a photo-realistic way. The 'Dynamic Lighting' extension does the trick!

PhysicsEditor is a GUI tool to create collision shapes within seconds! Without specifying any additional options PhysicsEditor already creates very good results, but you also have enough options available to adjust things to your needs.

The Number one particle effects editor designed specifically for Mac. Choose from a massive user submitted library or design your own unique effects. Use Starlings Particle plugin to integrate those particle systems into your game in no time.

Here's how to earn money with your games

Monetization

The flexible monetization and advertising solution for your app and mobile website. RevMob's rewarded video ads allows you to monetize your user base to its fullest potential while keeping them engaged.

Generate some of the highest CPMs in the world with our focus on native advertising, video and interactive video. MRAID compliant, the latest in-app video technology, drives significant revenue and high global fill rates. Serve incentivize reward videos, interstitial ads, and offerwalls with our SDK that supports all major platforms.

100% Identical AS3 API with a super easy interface so you can focus on your game logic and easily have access to all the cool features of the Google Game Services on both Android & iOS! Leaderboards, Achievements, Saved games, Multiplayers, Game quests & events, etc...